Drupal Development Blog

Looking over Administer > Site building > Modules list I've identified the following three modules to add to my site:

Path

Allows users to rename URLs

Search

Enables site-wide keyword searching

Statistics

Logs access statistics for your site

Easily done, just by checking those boxes and saving the configuration.

Putting them to use though requires a bit more work.

Search Settings

To get the search module working, go to Administer ? Site configuration >
Search settings and configure and save. In order to get the site indexed, I used cron which I got to from Administer ? Logs > Status report then clicked the link to 'run cron manually'.

Site Log

The statistics module must be enabled by going to Administer ? Logs > Access log settings. Once this is done you can see your own activity and those of other visitors to your site by browsing the numerous log views available from the Administer > Log screens.

Nice URLs

The path module is the most complicated to set up, because it involves a variety of steps as well as ongoing maintenance to use to its fullest potential.

For an overview, see Path: readable URLs on Drupal.org. For a step by step, start with the Clean URLs tutorial.

It was easy for me to follow the above explanation, set up my .htaccess file with the Apache mod rewrite directives as given, and it worked immediately. That will then allow you to use a URL such as

http://webtrouble.com/drupaldev/node/1

instead of the default

http://webtrouble.com/drupaldev/?q=node/1

But that's not the whole story. Once you've installed the path module, and then directed Apache to accept simplified URLs, you've also got to do two more things:

1. Enable clean url's at Administer ? Site configuration > Clean URLs
2. Begin the process of creating meaningful url paths at Administer ? Site building > URL aliases